Ninety-one per cent of Canadians say this election is either ‘way more important’ or ‘more important’ than the 2021 campaign.
When has a politician ever admitted that an election they were contesting was unimportant? The honesty alone could be quite refreshing.
In 2021, Justin Trudeau might have simply come clean and asked for the majority mandate that eluded him back in 2019. “Just give it to me,” he should have said. “I want it.”
More recently, Ontario’s Doug Ford was looking to lock in for another four years while his opposition was divided and weak, and while he was riding high on “Captain Canada” schtick. That, too, was presented as an election of the utmost, ALL-CAPS, bold-fonted and italicized importance.
If voters are told a particular election is especially important when it’s really just a routine exercise in democracy or a blatant power grab, they tend to tune out. And they’re less likely to show up and cast a ballot.
Cue the hand-wringing over declining voter participation, which hit particular nadirs in 2008 (the third election in four years), when only 59 per cent of eligible voters deigned to cast a ballot; followed by 2011 (the fourth election in six years), when only 61 per cent of the qualified voting base mustered the energy to attend a polling station.
Why don’t Canadians vote? According to a Statistics Canada study of eligible adults who didn’t vote in the 2021 election, the most common reason was a lack of interest in politics: about one-third said this. Elderly non-voters were more likely to cite disability or sickness, while millennials, in their strung-out years of building careers and raising kids, were most likely to say they were “too busy.”
The thing is, when voters actually deem an election to be significant, they act. They were exhausted after a decade of fiscal austerity under former prime minister Stephen Harper and increasingly concerned at the time about Canada’s place in the world (sound familiar?), so the 2015 election that swept Trudeau to power saw turnout hit nearly 70 per cent.
When voters actually deem an election to be significant, they act.
There is something very different about the campaign we are in now. It is voters, not candidates, who are expressing the weight of it. What would have been an election decided on whether the gasping Liberals deserved a fourth term has been turned on its head as U.S. President Donald Trump announces devastating tariffs that will ravage Canada’s economy.
Ninety-one per cent of Canadians say this election is either “way more important” or “more important” than the 2021 campaign (only 62 per cent bothered to exercise their franchise four years ago). Compare the sentiment now to 2019, when only 64 per cent felt that year’s campaign was more important than the 2015 version.
But important to whom? And why? Polling from the Angus Reid Institute shows Liberal and Conservative supporters are almost equally seized with the consequences of this spring’s vote. More than 75 per cent of each party’s base rates its significance as epochal.
Their motivations, however, are different. For decided Liberal supporters and leaners — a group more likely to be urban, female and at least slightly less financially stressed — health care and the next prime minister’s ability to take on Trump are at the top of the list of issues they care about.
For decided and leaning Conservative voters — a group more likely to skew male, suburban or rural, and more financially stressed — deficit spending and taxation rate high, although so too does managing Trump.
Both bases share one top concern: the cost of living.
The parties must offset weaknesses with strengths. The Liberals’ ceiling is higher: at present they simply have more people expressing an intention to vote their way. And it’s stronger in the most vote-saturated provinces of Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. But, only about half of Mark Carney’s support has “locked in”; the other half could change their minds or simply not show up.
By contrast, the Conservative base is far more solid, and motivated. Every fully-decided-no-way-will-I-change-my-mind supporter is one the party can take to the (vote) bank. The problem: the Conservatives are trailing in metropolitan centres and strongest in the traditional garrisons of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Pierre Poilievre needs more votes, in more places.
Regardless of what’s driving them, it’s no stretch to expect voter turnout will be higher this time around than the last two. And so it should be. Advance voting starts April 18. Go vote.
Shachi Kurl is President of the Angus Reid Institute, a national, not-for-profit, non-partisan public opinion research foundation.
